Institutional ethics committees remain largely absent from the literature on error reduction and patient safety. In this paper, the author endeavors to fill the gap. As noted in the Hastings Center's recent report, "Promoting Patient Safety," the occurrence of medical error involves complex web of multiple factors. Human misstep is certainly one such factor, but not the only one. This paper bui...

Interim Report of Healthcare Delivery after East Japan Earthquake-Tsunami Disaster – Does EHR Help? M. Kimura1; S. Oku2; R. Yamamoto3 1Hamamatsu University, School of Medicine, Hamamatsu, Japan; 2Center for Advanced Research of Information Science and Technology (CAIST), Aizu Research Cluster for Medical Engineering and Informatics (ARC-Medical), Aidu-Wakamatsu, Japan; 3University of Tokyo, Int...

BACKGROUND The rhetoric of primary health care philosophy in the district health system is widely cited as a fundamental component of the health transformation process in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite South Africa's progress and attempts at implementing primary health care, various factors still limit its success. DISCUSSION Inconsistencies and poor understanding of primary care and pr...

The study used a questionnaire to assess the delivery of veterinary services as perceived by users in four peri-urban areas in Ghana. Eight hundred and eighty nine respondents were interviewed: 10.7% were cattle farmers, 27.4% were small ruminant farmers, 14.2% were pig farmers, 45.1% were poultry farmers and 2.6% reared various animals on a part-time basis. Most of the animal health needs were...

There is great allure in the concept of using qualified health care providers to assist radiologists and radiation oncologists, increasing efficiency and possibly even improving patient care delivery. However, physician services are most commonly reimbursed under a system that is resource based, and the physician work and practice expense components of reimbursement for existing procedure codes...

The formal study of intercultural communication is generally associated with the publication of Edward Hall’s “The Silent Language” in 1959, where the author showed how culture is critical to understanding intercultural communication. After millennia of research, intercultural communication challenges today are global and by that it is meant that intercultural communication is present in every ...

UCSF Center for Health and Community [2] The Center for Health and Community at UCSF (CHC) was established to assess the challenges of the changing health care delivery environment and identify policies and interventions that will maximize the beneficial impact of the changing health care delivery system. Under the leadership of CHC, scientists, clinicians and policy analysts collaborate throug...

This article reports on research into the changing role of generalist community nurses in Victoria during the 1990's. It provides an analysis of the implications of current policy trends and presents an overview of current practice and trends in contemporary health care delivery in the community. It discusses a vision for community nursing inspired by interviews with generalist community nurses...

Noncompliance with medical instructions is a major problem in health care. In areas of the world where traditional and Western systems co-exist, failure to follow medical directives has been attributed to the conscious rejection of Western medical beliefs and values by the indigenous population. This study provides evidence that the absence of shared concepts between practitioners and patients ...

Hospitals are under significant pressure from payers to reduce costs. The single largest fixed cost for a hospital is inpatient beds, yet there is significant variation in hospital capacity utilization. We study bed capacity in New York City hospital obstetrics units and find that while many hospitals have an insufficient number of beds to provide timely access to care, overall there is signifi...